Bill Gates, Warren Buffett to
Launch ‘Game-Changing’ Nuclear
Power Plant in Wyoming

..and the caldera?

This certainly beats windmills and solar panels. Small nuclear power plants have been in use by the Navy for many years, They power submarines, aircraft carriers, and others. They endure surviving on an unstable platform, as the craft move on/in the ocean, external vibrations, and everything else associated with moving vessels. The technology is mature and safe. The only reason every city/county doesn't have one is the hysteria fomented by the left. Even as the technology advances, the hysteria and lies of the radical environmentalists remains...

Look up the Wolf Creek Nuclear Power Plant in Burlington, KS, not too far from where I live. It is an absolute MODEL nuke plant, makes power reliably, and at a very reasonable cost and has for decades. THIS is what we need more of. And we absolutely must have nuclear fuel reprocessing plants opened back up. The current situation uses the nuclear fuel rods ONCE and then tosses them aside, after only using 1% of the power in the nuclear fuel. Not only is this creating a huge waste problem, it is incredibly stupid to waste most of the energy in the nuclear fuels. I don't trust these two guys as far as I can throw their "power plant".

I could be wrong, but this sounds like a thorium reactor. If so, it probably does not require a pressurized containment core, it's safer and produces much less radioactive waste. Could be a good move.

Another benefit of small nuke plants would be taking us off the massive grid and protecting us from an EMP strike. The quickest way to take this nation down would be an air burst nuke over the west or east coast - faster and more effective than an engineered bio weapon - but a little more obvious.

Reply to #4 - Very similar concept, using a different fuel. Both are low pressure, high temperature designs - the Gates design uses molten chlorine salts as opposed to thorium. Both are considered to be breeder reactors (they produce more fissile material than they consume) so are much less wasteful than conventional light water designs. The downside is that breeders can be used for uranium enrichment which, of course, makes them also useful for nuclear weapons construction. Not sure how Gates and company are planning to get around regulatory on that factor. If I remember correctly, all of these molten salt fast reactor types are breeders which may throw a wrench in the works.

And i ask you, would a marine rather carry a nuclear reactor into battle or a set of jumper cables? And is not a witch heavier than a stone? And is not a bridge also made of stone? This new science is fascinating!!!

That is a strange place to built a nuclear plant since there are huge reserves of coal in Wyoming. Is anyone concerned about what happens when molten sodium is exposed to the air?

The guy who gave us "Control+Alt+Delete" as a last ditch cure for faulty software wants to run several nuclear reactors - what could possibly go wrong? And Biden is behind the idea too? Funny this type of infrastructure isn't included in his new bill. The 1.6 trillion spending could have had quite a few of these reactors paid for - real infrastructure. His new infrastructure bill is mostly composed of payoff to the cheaters who stole the election for him.

Ah! only lefty liberals like Gates and Buffett can build nuclear power plants. Got it. The Green movement trusts their lefty leaders. Besides the lefty leaders will make sure to payoff the lefty protestors to go elsewhere. The Lady Chihuahua asks an interesting question: What will they use for water in Wyoming, and do Wyoming rivers freeze up during winter? Will this power plant use any water?

Anyone else think it is a BAD IDEA to let a renowned population control freak spend his fortunes building a nuke plant in the U.S.???!!

Please, please, don't let it run on Windows 95 OS.

One of THE most interesting threads I’ve ever read.

#4 to #6, thanks for the information. You are obviously up on nuclear.

I’m shocked that Wyoming is on board with this!

One poster mentioned the almost mythical thorium reactors. The issue with thorium reactors is that they create lots of high quality nuclear weapons materials, all separated out automatically by the process, meaning that each of these thorium reactors would be a really attractive target for terrorists. Both plutonium and bomb grade uranium are 'bred' in the reactors, and need to be continuously filtered out during operation....meaning they are just sitting there, available to be stolen. And four thorium commercial reactors were built, and all four failed. This "new design" is said to be a "sodium cooled fast reactor". That means liquid metal sodium used to extract the heat from the uranium core and transport the heat to the water to make steam to run the turbines. That isn't at all "new". Someone here mentioned "like sub and aircraft carrier reactors which have proven safe"....this is entirely wrong. The USN reactors are pressurized water reactors, identical in basic design to the standard reactors used in most nuclear power plants. Gates' sodium cooled reactor has almost nothing in common with them, and no operating safety experience would relate at all. There have been a number of sodium cooled reactors built, one in Japan, which had a sodium leak which, of course, caused a dramatic fire since sodium metal burns in air with any contact with moisture. The French had three, all shut down now. Germany had one, shut down almost 30 years ago. India has a very small one still operating. There is nothing much really new or advanced about sodium cooled reactors. They have been built since as early as the 50s as experimental reactors, and commercially since the 70s, and almost all are now shut down. Clearly the people operating them didn't find much compellingly positive about them. Gates and Buffet have a good marketing game going, and they might even believe the hype that their team is selling to them, but I think that these two 'I think I am really smart, just ask me' billionaires are being taken to the cleaners by the nuclear design guys feeding them a great line about how wonderful this will be, 'all we need is a few billion more', when it is pretty much recycled old tech that has been run for 50-70 years and not found to have much commercial or technical advantage, and which has the very real and very frightening disadvantage of a coolant burns easily if there is the smallest leak in the piping. At least the water in a standard reactor doesn't catch fire. Pressurized water reactors (the standard of the world, pretty much, and what the USN uses) are commercially successful for a reason. They are stable, pretty darned safe and do not produce 'proliferation materials' if you don't reprocess the fuel. But, we SHOULD reprocess the fuel, and just keep the weapons grade material under tight control. I see nothing really much new here, except a new group of suckers being fleeced to fund it.

I commented that this was 'nothing new'....and that seems true about the reactor. BUT.....there is a bit of new. As to "new".....the molten salt energy storage is pretty new. It's not clear exactly why they think that this 'surge capability' is needed, perhaps so that they can make the reactor lower capacity and store 'off peak' power, run the reactor at a more constant power level. OK, that's innovative.....but really, unnecessary. Normal PWRs can ramp up and down as needed relatively well, but you normally don't want to. Economically, operating a nuclear reactor at less than rated power isn't desirable, since there are no reduction in costs, just reduction in income stream from selling electricity. Not like a coal or gas fired unit where you dial back to 50% you save half of the fuel budget.....no savings at a nuke plant by running at half power. The use for nuke power plants has always been 'base load' and run them at 100%, since your costs of operation are independent of output. I guess if they imagine making a 'too small' unit (which can't make enough power for the peak demand) then they can do their 'up and down' in the electrical demand with their molten salt energy storage system. I suppose that they are trying for a do all nuke plant.. without the normal fossil fuel plants (which are more amenable cost wise to throttling back) as part of the grid. This makes some sense if you buy their BS stories about "carbon pollution", which I don't. But, hire engineers and tell them to design a system and pay them, and they'll design what you want within the limits of technology and your budget. Billy Boy and Buffet have a big budget. Silly idea, it seems to me. Keep using coal for a large part of your power demand, and use nuke for base load.

Don't call this sodium cooled reactor "Gates' reactor". He did not invent the technology,; it's been around for a long time. In fact, in the 80's I worked on a DOE project where we closed the fuel cycle - simply put we made new fuel elements from reprocessed nuclear fuel and then loaded that fuel back into the reactor (I was a fuel fabrication engineer in those days). It'll be interesting to see how the Biden Administration pushes this to the no nukes NIMBY liberals, especially once they learn this is essentially a breeder reactor. And as someone else has mentioned, unless reprocessing is allowed, we will be dealing a a different type of spent reactor fuel to store and dispose of at a very high cost.

Bill Gates needs to take care of his home.

And if anything goes wrong, one less red state.

Thanks to all knowledgeable posters. I really believe in nuclear, especially if they go with the spent fuel reprocessing as mentioned above. There are many forces at work, trying to burden our citizens with high energy costs.

Why in the world would you trust Gates or Buffett to handle anything like this?

Nuclear power plants have been around for ages. Nothing "game changing" about this, except their claims.

I don’t trust Buffett and I darn sure don’t trust Gates.

In the 1980's Westinghouse operated the FFTF (Fast Flux Test Facility) at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation near Richland WA. I was an engineer responsible for providing the technical direction for the fabrication of the metallic components used in the fuel assembles. The fuel was a mixed oxide of U and Pu pellets that were clad in a 20% cold worked 316L SS tube. Molten Na was the coolant. It operated very successfully for over ten years without a fuel failure (except for one experiment where the fuel assembly was ran far beyond the design limits). No Na fires or incidents. Shut down in the early 90's because of political short sightedness.